The Servant of God Father John Beyzym was born in Beyzymy Wielkie in Volhynia May 15, 1850. After finishing high school in Kiev, he entered the novitiate of the Jesuits in Stara Wieś near Brzozów. Received Holy Orders in Krakow from the hands of Bishop Albin Dunajewski in 1881. For many years he was an educator and patron of young people in the colleges of the Society of Christ in Tarnopol and Chyrow. Read the rest of this entry »

Father Jacques Marquette SJ, sometimes known as Pere Marquette, was a French missionary who founded Michigan’s first European settlement, Sault Ste. Marie, and later founded St. Ignace, Michigan. Father Marquette and Louis Jolliet were the first non-Native Americans to see and map the northern portion of the Mississippi River.

Jacques Marquette was born in Laon, France, on June 1, 1637 and joined the Society of Jesus at age seventeen. After working and teaching in France for several years, he was dispatched to Quebec in 1666 to preach to the Native Americans, where he showed great proficiency in the local languages, especially Huron. In 1668 Father Marquette (French: Père Marquette) was redeployed by his superiors to missions farther up the St. Lawrence River in the western Great Lakes. He worked at Sault Ste. Marie and at the Mission of the Holy Spirit in La Pointe, on Lake Superior, near the present-day city of Ashland, Wisconsin. Here, he came into contact with members of the Illinois tribes, who told him of the existence of the Mississippi River and invited him to come teach further south. Because of wars between the Hurons at La Pointe and the neighboring Dakota people, however, Father Marquette had to relocate to the Straits of Mackinac; he informed his superiors about the rumored river and requested permission to explore it.

Leave was granted, and in 1673, Marquette was joined by Louis Joliet, a French Canadian explorer. They departed from St. Ignace on May 17, with two canoes and five other voyageurs of French-Indian ancestry. They followed Lake Michigan to the Bay of Green Bay and up the Fox River. From there, they portaged to the Wisconsin River, which they were told led to the river they sought. On June 17, they entered the Mississippi near Prairie du Chien.

The Joliet-Marquette expedition traveled to within 435 miles (700 km) of the Gulf of Mexico but turned back at the mouth of the Arkansas River. By this point they had encountered several natives carrying European trinkets, and they feared an encounter with explorers or colonists from Spain.[2] They followed the Mississippi back to the mouth of the Illinois River, which they learned from local natives was a shorter route back to the Great Lakes. They returned to Lake Michigan near the location of modern-day Chicago. Marquette stopped at the mission of St. Francis Xavier in Green Bay in September, while Joliet returned to Quebec to relate the news of their discoveries.

Marquette and his party returned to the Illinois Territory in late 1674, becoming the first Europeans to winter in what would become the city of Chicago. In the spring of 1675, the missionary again paddled westward and celebrated a public Mass at the Grand Village of the Illinois near Starved Rock. A bout of dysentery picked up during the Mississippi expedition, however, had sapped his health. On the return trip to St. Ignace, he died near the modern town of Ludington, Michigan.

The Michigan Historical Marker at this location reads:

“ Father Jacques Marquette, the great Jesuit missionary and explorer, died and was buried by two French companions somewhere along the Lake Michigan shore on May 18, 1675. He had been returning to his mission at St. Ignace which he had left in 1673 to go exploring in the Mississippi country. The exact location of his death has long been a subject of controversy. A spot close to the southeast slope of this hill, near the ancient outlet of the Pere Marquette River, corresponds with the death site as located by early French accounts and maps and a constant tradition of the past. Marquette’s remains were reburied at St. Ignace in 1677. ”

His grave is now located at what is currently the Ojibway Museum on State Street in downtown St. Ignace. Father Marquette is memorialized in several towns and rivers that bear his name (such as Marquette, Michigan), as well as the Father Marquette National Memorial near St. Ignace. Pere Marquette State Park near Grafton, Illinois, is located at the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers and is the site where Indians of the Illini Confederation showed Marquette a faster return route to the Great Lakes.

Roman Martyrology: In London, England, Saint Edmund Campion, Rodolfo Sherwin and Alexander Briant, priests and martyrs under Queen Elizabeth I, celebrated for their ingenuity and strength in faith. Edmund, who from an early age he professed the Catholic faith, admitted into the Society of Jesus in Rome and was ordained priest in Prague, he returned home, where, for their efforts in comforting the souls of the faithful with his words and his writings , was killed, after many torments, at Tyburn. With him suffered the same torments the saints Rudolph and Alexander, the second of which he obtained in prison to be admitted into the Society of Jesus. Read the rest of this entry »

Born in Guadeloupe in 1891, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1911, after two of his sisters had taken the veil. He studied in Nicaragua, Spain and Belgium, where he was ordained a priest in 1925. Back in Mexico, he carried out his mission in a period of persecution against the Church. In 1927 he was wrongly accused of being part of a plot to kill a general candidate for president. After a farcical trial, he was shot. To his funeral, defying prohibitions, rushed 20 thousand people. He was beatified on September 25, 1988 by Pope John Paul II, together with other Mexican Martyrs of Persecution. Read the rest of this entry »

Jesuit Priest, native of Japan, Julian Nakaura was martyred in his homeland in the context of fierce waves of persecution against Christians. Following a rapid process started with the green light by the Holy See granted on 2 September 1994, his Martrydom was recognized on July 1, 2007 and he was beatified on November 24, 2008, during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, together with 187 other Japanese Martyrs.

He was born January 10, 1607 at Orleans in France. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1624 and in 1636, after receiving ordination, he was sent to North America to evangelize indigenous peoples. Hhe went to the Great Lakes, where he lived for six years always exposed to various dangers. In 1642, Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil and coadjutor with the forty Hurons, fell into an ambush stretched by the Iroquois. They were all tortured and savagely mutilated. The night they put them on the floor, naked and chained, and pour over them hot coals and ashes. Jogues was transferred to Albany, where the merchants Dutch Calvinists helped him to escape. He returned to France. But in 1644 the missionary departed for Canada. Two years later he was shot in the neck and decapitated. There were eight Jesuit Martyrs in North America, all Beatified in 1925 and Canonized in 1930 by Pope Pius XI.

Roman Martyrology: In the village of Ossernenon in Canada, the passion of St. Isaac Jogues, Jesuit Priest and Martyr, who was enslaved by some pagans and had his fingers mutilated, then died with his head smashed by a blow of the ax.

Roman Martyrology: On the French coast in the sea off Rochefort, Blessed John Nicholas Cordier, Priest and Martyr who, after the abolition of the Society of Jesus carried out his priestly ministry in the territory of Verdun, until, during the French Revolution, threw for priest in a galley at anchor, died of diseased lethal starvation. Read the rest of this entry »